The Month That Changed Everything: our lead generation experience for a classifieds website in the UK

"My phone rang." Guess who? No, not an elephant from a children's poem, but someone much more interesting! Picture this: we're minding our own business, and then... Bam! A call straight from the United Kingdom! — Hello there! — we hear on the other end. — Help! Help! As it turned out, it wasn't a Queen's Guard who got lost, but the owner of a new British classifieds website (similar to our ss board) begging for help. What did he need? Oh, practically nothing — just to develop a promotion strategy and validate a bunch of crazy ideas. No big deal, right? And that's how, friends, our crazy month began, turning everything we knew about promoting startups upside down. Fasten your seatbelts, here we go!

Our Client: Classifieds website, United Kingdom

Duration: June-July 2019

Target: United Kingdom

Goal: Website lead generation (user registrations from the UK)

What we did for the client:

Since the portal was brand new and had virtually no users, we decided to split our lead generation efforts into organic and paid channels. For organic promotion, we leveraged Facebook groups in various regions of the UK, sharing links pointing to the classifieds portal (there were plenty of such groups there). Paid lead generation was driven by Google Search and banner ads. We designed several variations of search and banner ads with links pointing to the website, targeting different Google search queries and key website categories.

Here is one of the ads:

Here are the results of one Google Search ad:

The cost per click was €0.16, with 119 target clicks to the site. According to the client, 12 of those clicks converted into leads, resulting in a 10% conversion rate. Overall, a solid result for a lead generation campaign.

Given that we had access to the website's analytics, lead generation from free Facebook traffic turned out to be minor. Consequently, we focused our efforts on paid Google ads: half were banner ads, and the other half were search ads.

Project Challenges: Promoting a classifieds portal is inherently challenging due to the nature of the platform. Another unfavorable factor was that the website was brand new, and our campaign ran for a very short period (1 month). Prospective users visited the site for the first time, explored it, and many left. We were targeting a completely cold audience. By nurturing leads over a longer time horizon, much stronger results could have been achieved. One month of work with such a large-scale portal is simply not enough. It requires at least 6 to 12 months to build brand awareness across the UK so that residents become familiar with the portal, which naturally drives up registrations (leads).

This case study was prepared for you by Stanislava, who hosts our company's column "Case Studies. Website SEO". Stanislava has 30 years of experience in marketing, over 18 years in SMM, is an expert in social media business promotion, has over 15 years of experience in SEO, is an expert in search engine optimization, and is the founder of our full-cycle digital agency (from idea to website, from website to promotion) — webSEOMarket.